Friday, October 13, 2006

He'll Teach Us How to Be Bad-Ass

Robert Mitchum Collection. January 23. Two movies from his RKO prime, Otto Preminger's Angel Face, which pairs him with Jean Simmons, and the entertaining Josef Von Sternberg/Nick Ray/Howard Hughes mess, Macao, which pairs him with Jane Russell (both of which I expected to be part of a film noir collection; I guess I was wrong). Two "prestige" pictures: Vincente Minnelli's Home From the Hill and Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners. And two movies from his actor-for-hire phase, a not-very-good Western (The Good Guys and the Bad Guys) and a not-bad crime drama (The Yakuza). Overall, a pretty good cross-section of this baddest-ass of bad-asses.

Or as Joe Queenan put it when talking about why Mitchum was miscast in Ryan's Daughter (he's good, but miscast): "A man who used to make movies with Jane Russell cannot be convincingly cast as a cuckold."

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